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Last week I had the fortune to attend a tournament at Redcap’s Corner in Philadelphia with the Philly usual suspects and a lot of newcomers. 22 people were in attendance and I have to say it that it was one of the most enjoyable small tournaments I have participated in. The field was full of interesting decks, strong competitors and a friendly, love of the game atmosphere.

We played five rounds of swiss with no cut to top 8, letting strength of schedule break ties. For me, the highlights were splitting with the world champ Dan D’Argenio in our match and facing off against a very effective Tennin grail build as well as a hostile infrastructure Replicating Perfection deck.

I ended up finishing in the middle of the pack due to some key mistakes and the world champ took the day by a single strength of schedule point from another Philly local.

When you look at the tournament as a whole a few interesting trends emerge centered around the corp side of the game. If we glance at the IDs seen below you can see that ….

we had a plurality of Personal Evolution, which, to my knowledge has never happened in the US. Also, the fast advance factions of HB and NBN were relatively underrepresented compared to other tournaments this year. I attribute this first to worlds being behind us and people being more willing to take risks with their IDs.

Secondly, even the world champ said that one of the most interesting decks to appear at worlds was Minh Tran’s Personal Evolution deck. Clearly, the word is out on the power of jinteki in the hands of a practiced pilot. Feeding directly into all the various net damage decks and Blue Sun is this little chart:

33 percent of all of the corp victories were flatlines, which completely changed the way people ran and the overall feel of the tournament. This tournament was less about outrunning the corp and more about survival, which I haven’t experienced since supermodernism Weyland ruled the roost.

My own Blue Sun deck went 5-0, flatlining every opponent except one. On the runner’s side I only won a single game and I lost to net damage flatlines in 3 out of 5 games. It was a crazy head space to get into that over a third of the field (nisei, PE, BS) were trying to flatline the runner as a primary win condition. What is really awesome is that the number of kill decks correlates closely with the amount of flatlines that occured, meaning the corps are getting it done.

In closing when you look at the day as a whole, corporations dominated the tournament, but not the ones most people have been playing for the competitive ‘season’ this year. Also, when comparing the chart above to my experience when I started playing during the genesis cycle, we live in a brave new netrunner world. It used to be very difficult to win as the corp in this game, your runner game was your easy win and now that has completely reversed.

With fast advance and all the kill decks you need to play well AND get lucky to win as the runner. Personal Evolution was hardly ever played, a cursory glance at stimhack shows that it rarely appeared before Honor and Profit. For it now to be the dominant ID at a 22 person tournament is an exciting shift that bodes well for the ongoing playability of the game.

PE puts the runners into a whole different mindset than any other match up and I love having the change the way I think about netrunner. I can only hope that the new big box and the coming San San Cycle will balance the game closer to 50/50 but the game remains fun even as the pendulum swings back and forth.

Welcome back everyone and sorry for the long hiatus, I am transferring my employment to a different hypercorp so I lost my handle on the blog.

My feelings exactly

Today I would like to discuss the big box expansion for Weyland and Anarch factions that will be released shortly. More specifically, the Anarch cards that will add much needed power to our runner decks.

With these cards looming in the distance, I feel the current state and future of the Anarch faction merits discussion. Order and Chaos may be the push that Anarchs need to become dominant in their own right. When you look at stimhack they seem to be occasional dark horse winners and a glance on any deckbuilder will reveal them to be the most borrowed from faction, and yet they are not dominant at high levels of play.

To understand we must first ask ourselves what do these orange cards do? Based on my experience Anarchs are good at interfering with the corporation’s strategy and circumventing the game’s “normal” mechanics. Parasite and datasucker are the most heavily borrowed anarch cards besides corroder and they directly change the value and impact of ice in the game. Ice destruction reduction/destruction continues to be common and looking at the roster from worlds 14 of the top 16 decks used datasucker and 6 of them used parasites. So pervasive is this strategy that cards such as lotus field and architect have created new ice mechanics in order to balance them.

When dealing with the corp, no matter what is popular, the tools to disrupt it comes from Anarch. Currently, asset

Deliver Us from Noise Mill

economy and big ice is strong with the strength of RP, NEH and Blue Sun in the meta. Imp and d4v1d are potent cards that can cut the legs out from under these decks and they are both Anarch cards. With the prevalence of Blue Sun,d4v1d has been pervasive in Shaper recursion decks as the most cost effective way of dealing with curtain wall and oversight AI.

So Anarchs have the best toys that everyone wants to borrow, and yet besides the Anatomy of Anarchy and a few Noise wins relatively few seem to play Anarch competitively. Competitive play is all about consistency and true to their theme they are chaotic and unreliable in their play. They are meh at money and super meh at drawing cards without a catch as with wyldside, duggars and inject. Also, the tools they need to borrow cost more influence than the tools they lend to other factions.

To use Noise as an example, utilizing the fantastic economy engine of cache and aesop’s pawnshop costs 9 out of 15 influence where as the entire Anarch breaker suite with datasuckers costs Andromeda 7 influence. Two datasuckers and two parasites for your ice destruction Katman hybrid costs you 6 influence, where the account siphons for anatomy of anarchy cost 12 influence.

The big box will add a lot of consistency across the board but certain cards in particular are going to make Anarchs more dangerous and successful. Bad pub control cards such as Valencia Estevez, Protestors,investigative journalism and blackmail will reduce economy problems while allowing Anarch to continue its long tradition of circumventing the corp strategy. Clot, the dark god of San San cycle (while not in O&C) will be a one cost, one influence virus that trashes on a purge that reads “The corp may not score any agenda on the turn its installed”. While far from a deathblow, the low cost and potability of this card will force fast advance players to work in other avenues to victory instead of putting all their eggs into the astro basket.

FInally, the four cards that will be most impactful overall to the Anarch playstyle are eater, forked, spooned and knifed. Eater is the AI breaker that Anarch has needed, a universal breaker that with efficiency of corroder and the low cost of a zero card access. You can still siphon, build virus counters, use keyhole,dirty laundry, quest completed and use the cutlery mentioned above to destroy ice setting up for future turns when you access more cards and get in more efficiently with your other breakers.

Welcome back to SMC, today’s topic will be the shift in card roles and values that the Lunar Cycle has brought on. The greatest of these shifts is caused by two new identities: Nasir Meidan and Blue Sun. Both of these add a new element to the game, transforming ice into economy. If you read these identities and look at the timing structures of Netrunner, the developers have done a great job of creating two very different ways of turning ice into sources of credits.

Nasir’s ability takes advantage of the timing structure of a run and the paid ability window after ice is rezzed but before it is encountered. What this means is utilizing cards like self modifying code, clone chip and most notably personal workshop he can dump credits and then gain credits to break the ice after installing the solution.

This effect requires a complete playstyle shift on the part of the corp. Now you have to decide whether that heimdall 2.0 is ever worth rezzing and you might not rez low strength ice when he has SMC because he will get in anyway. Even worse, he will be using your money. In short he really forces corps, especially big ice corps, into a new headspace where if you are not judicious with rezzing, the runner will proceed to the late game faster.

While this ability is powerful, it can be countered by corps that run light on ice or utilize low cost ice. Also, Nasir requires his tools to be in place in order for his ability to be a boon instead of an anchor. A Nasir player might hesitate to run if he doesn’t have anything on personal workshop. What makes his ability intriguing to me is the cards he makes more viable. The first that comes to mind are recurring credit consoles like spinal modem or toolbox. Toolbox has fallen out of the meta largely because of its up front costs in a world where corps set up fast and score fast. The solution? Let the corp pay for it with ice rezzes over the span of three turns. Furthermore, recurring credits (and stealth credits which I will discuss later) are valuable to Nasir in a way they haven’t been to other runners.

Moving on to Blue Sun, this card is a twisted mirror of Nasir. Where Nasir makes big ice bad for the corp and great for the runner, Blue Sun makes big ice more taxing for the runner while keeping costs low for the corp. This can create credit swings which favor the corp. Once again, the maximum effect of Blue Sun requires tools, the first of which is oversight AI followed by a piece of high cost ice such as curtain wall. If you use oversight AI on a curtain wall early in the game and put an agenda behind it, the likelihood that the runner can break a 10 strength barrier early on is low. If they can break it you spent 2 clicks and 1 credit to make them spend 11 credits with corroder or 3 credits and 3 d4v1d counters. In either scenario the runner spent much more than the corp to get in. When a turn starts and the oversighted curtain wall is not broken then the corp nets 13 credits and the ice comes safely back into the hand to be used later.

An entertaining feature of Blue Sun is that it is a direct counter to Nasir Meidan, as when you rez ice on your turn he cannot use his ability. Going back to the econ engine, as the runner you might need to break that curtain wall in order to prevent the corp from gaining the credits. This becomes a tax , eating up credits or tricks such as d4v1d. Blue sun also makes assets like the root and ash more useful and survivable as you refund their cost back and take them into your hand to use them again later. This creates what I consider to be the first dangerous card cycling corporation. That’s right, Blue Sun is gonna be corp shaper.

Another unexpected side effect of Blue Sun is it reactivates Weyland kill decks. I can maintain the 6 credit gap needed to kill a player with ease. Running becomes very dangerous when I can pull a curtain wall up to gain 14 credits even after ending my turn with zero. This enables Weyland to outpace magnum opus econ and forces the runner to get that plascrete out asap. This gap is also maintained by the glacial ice that Blue Sun wants to play, as most successful runs are going to cost the runner a large number of credits.

So going back to my opening line, I sense a disturbance in the meta. Not because I think everyone will be playing these two identities but because the cards and strategies that these idents will bring to the forefront will change the way people will play and will open up new archetypes as players build to counter them.

Netrunner designers, you are doing a great job at balancing this game. In the breath following a discussion of Blue Sun I have to discuss another Lunar identity, Quetzal, who can counter it. One thing that Blue Sun wants is big ice and most of Weyland’s repertoire is taxing barriers. Staying true to her anarch faction, Quetzal is the most efficient barrier breaker there is. It will get a lot harder to get your money back for that oversight AI hadrians when she can use her ability and then a SINGLE credit for e3 feedback filters to break it.

Her synergy with d4v1d, e3, and Knight makes glacier decks harder to play and her cheap breaks mirrors the cheap rezzes of Blue Sun, tilting the playing field back towards the runner in many hard match ups. For example, the cheap, one subroutine barriers of fast advance decks are essentially blank to her, making 4-5 ice dead in decks that already run light on ice. You now need at least two barriers on a server, so the most taxing barrier on each server is getting turned off or turned down with her tools in play.

Another aspect of Quetzal that I appreciate is that she creates new anarch archetypes, such as a high pressure deck that doesn’t use account siphon. With very few tools she can get in to most servers and start digging early. Her ability and e3 feedback filters keeps with the theme of changing the ice choices corps make because suddenly eli isn’t the best bang for buck barrier.

Today is a great day to play Netrunner because stealth has arrived as a powerful archetype. Stealth breakers such as blackat, switchblade and refractor are brutally efficient but require other cards to be used. You pay a tax of jank and inconsistency for a payoff of cheap runs. Up until the lunar cycle the tools were not all in place and there weren’t runners in the game that could maximize the risk to reward ratio of a stealth deck. Nasir is one such runner. He wants to dump credits and can be shut down by low cost ice. Meanwhile, money that sits on other cards and not in your credit pool is the wind beneath his wings. Also, with the release of refractor, Kit can play effectively to her strength of early aggression. She has always been an outsider in shaper, a cyborg that wants to run early, and her tools (like yogasaurs) were powerful but expensive and time consuming, contradicting her nature.

Gordian blade and torch are expensive to use and install respectively, and cybercypher focuses your aggression on one server. With refractor and one source of stealth in play, you threaten any server for an install cost of 2 credits. This forces the corp to double ice centrals and remotes fast and enables you to pressure while setting up the rest of your rig. From the get go you will be spending less to run than the corp does to rezz. The inclusion of late game econ like Kati Jones or magnum opus as well as HQ and RD interfaces can provide board control in the mid to late game. Late game stealth Kit can run anywhere for insignificant credits, making agendas unsafe in all centrals and remotes.

The lesson of the Lunar Cycle is that the role of ice is changing and that we all have to think differently about what we choose to include and how/when we rez. These card additions could also herald a change in the economic engines that runners use in the quest for efficiency relative to corporate costs.

I Like to play bad runners and bad corps, I like to play non-meta because it makes me feel like Rocky Balboa when I win. That makes me a hipster, and it has made it difficult for me to get good at netrunner.

I can make this work!

The fruits of my labors were on NetrunnerDB and people loved my strange engines. I had success on OCTGN and in person. However, the win ratio was not good, not when you considered how many games I had played. It was puzzling to me and I dismissed it as net decking and people being under-creative and over-competitive.

About two months ago after finishing 29th out of 120 at regionals I realized what was holding me back. It wasn’t that I played strange decks or that other people played broken decks, it was that a tier one deck had never been made using my cards. So regardless of what deck was sitting in front of me, I couldn’t make the right choices, I couldn’t win.

In order to play my strange decks and have them work I needed to understand the established engines and learn why they worked. Jumping from learning how to add and then attempting calculus instead of learning my times tables in between. Reading your opponents or identifying scoring windows becomes impossible when you don’t know how people think when they play Andromeda or NBN.

I know what you are thinking, Code, this is all obvious, you should play the good decks if you wanna get good at netrunner. However, that’s not the only lesson here. A few weeks after playing NBN FA and Andromeda, I started to win, a lot, I started to build my strange decks again and they won, most of the time.

It was the engines that were missing, the skeletons of good decks made it possible for me to play competitively and understand what my opponents were thinking. Understanding the core mechanics of netrunner is easiest when you look at tier one decks which tend to focus on brutal economic efficiency.

If you never learn how to cook properly you can’t effectively improvise a recipe and while self taught people may become successful, fundamentals in any field are important to reach the highest levels. Netrunner is no exception.